Print advertising is most effective when viewed by readers who would likely have an interest in the products or services being advertised. Print advertising in newspapers, for example, is typically directed to readers that are demographically identified by region, whereas print advertising in magazines and periodicals often relates to the publication's subject matter or theme.
Advertising is generally intended to create an interest in or to generate an awareness of products or services, and effectively targeting print advertising includes knowing the characteristics of the intended readership to ensure that the advertisements are both topical and eye-catching. A priori knowledge of a readership's characteristics may be difficult to gauge where the readership is a small audience, or where document content is uncertain until the time of publication, such as with limited circulation publications or personal printing.
One reason that advertising to a small audience remains difficult is that “short run” printing is relatively closed-ended and most advertisers lack access to the readership. Without access, advertisers can neither determine the readers' characteristics for effectively targeting advertising, nor physically place print advertisements in the documents. Moreover, the costs of advertising can disfavor small merchants and revenue potentially gained may not justify the cost of the undertaking, especially where the small merchants must compete against larger and better known competitors.
Even where access to the readership is available, an inability to obtain characteristics and demographics beyond any information already voluntarily disclosed can hinder advertisement targeting. For instance, the specter of identity theft and fear of receiving “junk” mail can undermine the willingness of individuals to divulge their personal information to third parties. Thus, the targeting of print advertising to small audience markets can be a gamble when little information about the readerships' characteristics is known with certainty.
Conventionally, Google, Inc., Mountain View, Calif., offers a targeted Web advertising program called AdSense. The pages for customers' Websites are automatically crawled and advertisements are placed in the margins based on the audience and Web page content. Customers are paid whenever visitors to their Website click on the placed advertisements and the potential for receiving advertising revenue provides an incentive for customers to allow targeted advertising. However, the incentives are limited to Web-displayable content and are unavailable to publishers of short printing runs or individual printing.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,269,361, issued Jul. 31, 2001 to Davis et al. discloses matching search results to advertiser Web pages by matching words parsed from user search queries, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference. The positions of entries for advertiser Web pages in the search listings are influenced through a continuous online competitive bidding process between the advertisers. A “click-through” payment model charges the advertisers, which is triggered when a user selects an advertiser Web page entry.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,891,635, issued May 10, 2005 to Dutta discloses a system and method for providing advertisements in Web-based printing in which a remote printing Web server receives advertisements from one or more advertisers, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference. The advertisements can include target audience attributes. A print user connects to the remote printing Web server and information about the user is gathered to match the user with appropriate advertisements. Advertisements are identified and combined with a document that the user wishes to print. The printer hosting site is paid by the advertisers for including their advertisements in printouts. However, the advertising is selected only by user-provided information and not document content. Nor is the user-provided information advantageously “mined” to generate targeted information, which could be provided to social groups, such as clubs, and other organizations that have a potentially shared interest. Moreover, the advertising is provided for paying advertisers who are not competitively selected.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,065,497, issued Jun. 20, 2006 to Brewster et al. discloses a system and method for automatically printing a document without user intervention, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference. A user profile, which stores information about the document recipient, such as name, email address, household income, and interests, is stored and updated when a document is printed. The user profile can be used to select information or advertising likely to be of interest to the user to be included in the document. A product can be subsidized for a user, such as a print consumable, based on the information contained in the user profile. However, the advertising is selected only by user profile information and not document content. Moreover, the advertising is provided for designated advertisers who are not competitively selected.
Therefore, there is a need for providing targeted print advertisement placement on documents printed for a small audience by incentivizing publishers and readers to divulge their characteristics and demographics and to permit the compensable placement of print advertisements on the documents thus produced.